Premier, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Premier Incorporated Fiscal 2022 Second Quarter Results and Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Angie McCabe. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome to Premier's fiscal 2022 second quarter call. Our speakers this morning are Mike Alkire, our president and CEO, and Craig McCasin, our chief administrative and financial officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our earnings release and the supplemental slides accompanying this conference call are available in the investor relations section of our website at investors.premierinc.com. Our remarks today contain certain forward-looking statements and actual results could differ materially from those discussed today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Factors that might affect future results are discussed in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K and our Form 10-Q for the quarter, which we expect to file soon. We encourage you to review these filings, including our detailed safe harbor and risk factor disclosures. Also, where appropriate, we refer to adjusted or other non-GAAP financial measures, such as free cash flow, to evaluate our business. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release. In the appendix of the supplemental slides accompanying this presentation and in our earnings form 8K, which we expect to furnish to the SEC soon. I will now turn the call over to Mike Alkire. Mike?

Thanks, Angie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased with our second quarter performance, which was in line with our expectation and reflects our focus on operational execution and growth in our core underlying businesses, despite the impact associated with the COVID-19 pandemic on our quarter-over-quarter basis. This morning, I will discuss some of the key emerging trends in healthcare and provide some highlights regarding the progress we are making toward achieving longer-term objectives. Craig will then review our operational and financial results, as well as a revised fiscal 2022 guidance in more detail later. We continue to help our members and other customers navigate the pandemic and prepare for the future of healthcare. We believe we are well positioned to address four key emerging healthcare trends. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a renewed focus on building a more resilient healthcare supply chain. This is in part due to many recent challenges, including product shortages, port closures, and other logistical issues associated with the pandemic and affecting the supply chain. For more than a decade, we have focused on designing a portfolio of offerings to address these potential disruptions, and we were quick to adapt that portfolio in the face of the challenges caused by the pandemic. Our data suggests members that took advantage of Premier's capabilities fared better than those that did not during the pandemic. We believe we are uniquely positioned to support healthcare supply chains by helping them focus on creating a greater diversity of supply sources while at the same time technology enabling operations and management of supply inventory. We anticipate continued member participation in our domestic manufacturing programs and expect to provide more real-time upstream and downstream visibility across the industry to help the market predict and plan for adverse events. Second, the pandemic has taken a significant toll on staffing within many healthcare organizations. Our analysis of our Pink AI data determined that the clinical staff are working 50% more hours than they were prior to the pandemic. This has likely contributed to employee burnout and resignations. One-third of all clinical employees have left their jobs since the pandemic began, nearly double the rate from two years ago. Our technology solutions enable our members and other customers to reduce inefficiencies and ensure business continuity. Third, there will be continued focus on technology enablement to automate and streamline manual processes and headcount. Key opportunities include, one, addressing manual disconnected processes with healthcare purchasing and procurement, which is why we are investing in and scaling our e-invoicing and e-payables with Remetra, our supply chain-focused SaaS-based digital payments and financial solutions platform. Second, automating administrative tasks necessary for assuring adequate reimbursement, which is why we've been seeing an increased interest in our artificial intelligence enabled coding and documentation decision support solution. And lastly, automated claims transactions and prior authorizations, which save significant time and labor, while also connecting patients with therapies in a timely manner. With regard to the fourth trend, we believe AI will continue to be a significant, important capability in terms of transforming healthcare. This trend is primarily driven by market needs, including the following. For many of the products currently available in the marketplace, there is a gap in the time it takes to generate evidence and use it to improve care delivery. At Premier, we are solving this challenge today through our applied sciences research capabilities and clinical decision support technology that is hardwired into the clinician workflow. There is also a need to better understand and address the uneven health needs and outcomes of different populations. We have been building natural language processing, or NLP, and other technologies within our Pink AI platform to help solve this issue. We're helping healthcare providers address healthcare disparities by using NLP to make sense of key indicators found in free tests. Participants in our performance improvement collaboratives are leveraging detailed data to understand how comorbidities and other complications influence health disparities. Healthcare continues to evolve, and we believe we are well positioned based on our strategy and unique combination of capabilities to capitalize on these trends. At our Investor Day last November, we discussed our strategies to deliver sustainable long-term growth. Our members are interested in enterprise-level analytics agreements, which were the primary drivers of growth in our performance services segment in the second quarter. These multi-year, multifaceted agreements bundle our core technology business capabilities with advisory services to deliver margin and clinical improvement together for our members. We believe moving from point solution sales to enterprise agreements affirms our position as a long-term strategic and transformational partner for our members and other customers. We also highlighted our plans to grow our early stage higher growth adjacent markets businesses. In the second quarter, we continue to make progress on this front. Our Contigo Health business recently announced a new partnership with Ohio Healthy. a provider-owned health plan in Ohio. OhioHealthy plans to leverage our business process operation services for health plan management, customer service, network administration, and support to help its members access higher quality, more affordable healthcare. In addition, we expect Contigo Healthcare Management Platform to be accessed by our own and OhioHealthy's clinical staff to monitor and manage utilization and help ensure effective collaboration between providers. We are very excited to partner with Ohio Healthy and believe this key development further validates Contigo Health's value proposition and our strategy to provide back office support and infrastructure at scale for self-insured employers. In our applied sciences business, we are partnering with multiple life sciences organizations on prospective research focused on improving patient outcomes in many therapeutic areas, including oncology, cardiovascular disease, and maternal health. Our work with women and infants follows our efforts to improve maternal health, namely our partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services to exclusively manage the perinatal improvement collaborative. We believe our unique approach and provider partnerships will help expedite the time to market for important therapies, and demonstrates the traction we are gaining in this market. I'm also pleased to announce our new partnership with QVenis, an AI-empowered software company that automates healthcare operations, enabling health systems to improve care coordination, increase surgical access and growth, and enhance profitability. Their solution, which complement our existing enterprise analytics capabilities, build upon hospital system investments and electronic health records and other technology solutions by utilizing AI and machine learning coupled with the latest in behavioral science and operations management to provide a real-time closed-loop automation platform. We will be partnering with QVENIS to offer their solution to the market as well as to develop new AI-based solutions. We are excited to collaborate with QVENIS. leveraging the combination of our expertise and unique data assets with their exceptional talent in AI and machine learning. We believe this represents another step in further differentiating our pink AI capabilities and strengthening our overall value proposition in the market. In summary, we remain very excited about the road ahead of us. We remain focused on executing our strategy, We believe we are well-positioned to continue helping our members and other customers successfully adapt to and even get ahead of emerging and evolving market trends. And we continue to advance our strategies to achieve our long-term growth objectives. I will now turn the call over to Craig McCaslin for a discussion of our operational and financial performance.